The RNA revolution, June 16th

My colleagues and I found your issue on RNA advanced helpful for communicating the importance of our field to the public despite the over-hyped analogy to the discovery of the neutron. In any case, the idea of a “RNA operating system” in living cells has been developing over the last decade based primarily upon the functions of thousands of proteins that regulate messenger RNAs and more recently has come to include small regulatory RNAs. While your articles showcased the fashionable small regulatory RNAs, RNA-binding proteins were not mentioned and both are essential components of RNA operating system(s).

Jack D. KeeneFounder, Duke Center for RNA Biology

Durham, North Carolina

SIR —

When an editor of an important international business magazine claims science finds the truth instead of a better theory we should be very concerned. The average first-year university student is taught that science is the technique of proposing theories that can be tested. The results of these tests are used to change these theories. These new theories in turn are available for further testing and so forth. Therefore the aim of science is to provide a more and more complete theory which is very well tested and still available for further testing. There is always a possibility that someone may come along in the future with a test which may cause the current theory to fail. We should encourage such people in an open, democratic and civilised society. The benefit of keeping to the scientific method is that scientists do not release on the general public untested processes based on untested incomplete theories such as genetic engineering. Imagine if nuclear power stations were originally built based on poorly tested and incomplete theories that were not available for all scientists to test. The further discovery of the role RNA plays is not a big bang but a tiny bit more knowledge in the quest to understand how life works. If we can respect this and the scientific method then perhaps we can stop pushing the unscientific process of genetic engineering on the general public until we have a well tested more complete theory of how life works.

Rupert van der MerweStellenbosch, South Africa

SIR —

May I suggest that your article on biology's big bang will be one of those predictions that proves catastrophically wrong for want of imagination.

Biology may be heading not for supremacy but for extinction at the hands of an altogether different discipline: robotics. With Moore's Law doubling the information processing capacity of non-biological systems every two years, with no end in sight, biological genes are in an evolutionary struggle for survival with non-biological "memes". A doubling every two years equates to a million-fold increase every forty, so the odds seem to favour robotics over biology.

Last year the British Office of Science and Innovation's Horizon Scanning Centre raised the prospect that within 20 to 50 years robots could be demanding "human" rights. Your own most recent Technology Quarterly discussed the development of lethal "ethical robots". (As if ethics were something that could be defined unambiguously even among human beings!!) By the year 2100, the only biological human beings left to witness the outcome of this struggle may be a few quaint specimens kept in a zoo for breeding purposes.